What is the Brexit?
“The world of hope, the world of ever-closer union among countries which for centuries would kill each other by the million — came to a shattering end on Thursday.”
On Thursday, Great Britain voted, via referendum, to exit the European Union. Over 33 million people (over 70% of the eligible voting electorate) turned out for the referendum, and the margin of victory was slim — under 5%.
How did this happen?
The referendum was put on the table by David Cameron, prime minister of the U.K, before his re-election in 2015. Ironically, Cameron supports remaining in the EU — it was called because Cameron was confident that the country would decisively vote to remain, and that this would unite the nation under his plans. It caused some market turmoil, and people were a little bit concerned, but it seemed unlikely to actually happen.
As recently as yesterday, prediction markets were saying that the probability of Brexit was south of 30% or so. Preliminary polling, and David Cameron, underestimated the extent to which rural England would want to leave, and England’s overall 53–47 margin in favor of leaving led the way. Wales also voted to leave, but Scotland and Northern Ireland were pretty decisive about wanting to stay:
Demographically, the leave vote was also carried by the older generation, who, incidentally, don’t have to live with the decision nearly as long. Jest aside, it seems that the campaign to Leave the EU appealed to older voters by pleading for independence and patriotism.
Finally, at risk of exposing my bias, I’ll just leave this graph here:
So if it was unexpected, what went wrong? And what should we learn?
It’s the economy. It’s always the damn economy! In particular:
- Europe has been stagnant, leading to migrant workers leaving the continent for Britain in search of work. Free movement enables these workers to move in and work British jobs as cheaper labor. The displaced labor is not pleased.
- Economic inequality continues to grow globally, creating an expanding dissatisfied class who wants to see change, whatever that looks like. Leaving the EU means change, and to some, it can’t get much worse.
- When things are rough, it’s always easier to blame “them” rather than look inwards, whoever “them” happens to be. In this case, it got easy for parts of the British population to blame the rest of the stagnant Europe, to blame immigrant and migrants, to blame the existing establishment. So they voted to leave.
On the one hand, there’s nothing inherently wrong with people who are unhappy voting for change. On the other, there is something wrong when that change is overwhelmingly likely to be net bad for the British economy. A lot of the evidence suggests that the Leave campaign bent the facts, and even straight up lied. But it’s more than that.
Leave didn’t need a logical argument, because people don’t make decisions based on logic, especially when they’re hurting. “They may not understand what he stands for but they understand the fuck out of how he makes them feel,” John Oliver said of Trump, and the same is true here. Leave succeeded not because leaving the EU was better for the people, but rather because they were able to sell the removal of free movement as a defense of both British jobs and the British identity.
Last night, a coworker told me: “Be safe in this scarier world” as I left the office. The world is scarier. Anti-establishment politics won a major victory — one that the establishment didn’t predict. Next could be the unraveling of the rest of the EU, instability in Europe, a Trump election…
So what can we do?
It’s easy, at this point, to say “You can vote!” And you can. But that’s not enough. A lot of it is about understanding the pain. We’ve gotten here by systemically underestimating the support that groups like Brexiteers and Donald Trump get, and this is a space where we need to be willing to dive deeper and learn. We need to stop underestimating ideas and movements that don’t make sense to us, because they make sense to somebody, and instead strive to understand how they might make sense.
But learning isn’t enough either. The polarization of politics, the appeal of feelings and fear over reason, these can only be reversed by attacking the root cause, by “building a ladder of hope.” By helping the millions that our economy and society has left behind find not just prosperity, but meaning. And we can’t wait for basic income and full automation and utopia. This work has to start now.
